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Monday, June 14, 2010

One of the most generous - and overwhelming - gifts I recieved from the overburdened fridge of my co-op placement was a rather large donation of whipping cream. And by large, I mean I came home with no less than 4 litres, or 16 cups, of the stuff. One measly cup made it's way into some luscious, cake-enrobing ganache, but then I was left with 15 cups of the undrinkable, not-likely-to-be-used but decadently good stuff sitting in my fridge. I wasn't planning on making ice cream or a fluffily-frosted cream cake any time soon - for one thing we were about to jet off to Florida for a week, and for another I felt...well... guilty about imposing good after baked good on the poor kind folks at my mom's office. But I couldn't just toss all that cream.

So I dragged out the stand mixer and the cheesecloth and made butter. Well, really, what would you do? In fairly short order those impossible-to-surmount litres of cream had transformed into neatly wrapped blocks of sweet, pale yellow butter. I portioned the batches into 8-oz segments before wrapping them up, then stuffed all but one into a giant Ziploc and stashed it in the freezer. There will be no want for the good stuff in the near future... at least for me. The rest of the family? Well, they can get their own. They don't know I've got this cache anyways!

Doesn't it look all gloriously decdent and rich in it's bowl?? At the same time as making all that luxurious butter, I was cooking up another kind of buttery treat - but without the dairy butter. Yes, that apple butter of mine was at it again, this time in an adaptation of a tried and true pie recipe by none other than Elizabeth Baird (and out of my favourite cookbook of hers, no less). As I usually do to recipes not commissioned by others, I nixed the eggs in favour of a blend of silken tofu and cream cheese, making for a rich, silky custard, and I lowered the fat content by substituting the cream (since you know, it was in use) with a can of evaporated skim milk. Then I kicked up all the spices, poured the filling into my prepped pie shells (you can use pre-made frozen if you want) and stuck them in to bake.

It smelled like Thanksgiving. Or a Thanksgiving-Christmas-apple picking ménage à trois, the apple aromas playing off the pumpkin pie-like spices and the scent of baking crust. I took one of the pies in with me on my last day at co-op as a thank you token, where both staff and kids polished it off in no time flat. All of them thought the pie was pumpkin, all of them loved the flavour, and none of them - especially the kids - suspected the tofu. I had bet my supervisor weeks before that I could get the kids to eat - and like - tofu, and I was making good on that bet! I waltzed out of there that afternoon congratulating myself with a sing-song "I got the kids to eat toooooffffuuuuu.... aaaand they liiiiiked it!".